The Remnants of Middle School

I thought I'd completely forgotten about all the stresses of middle school life (before uniforms were required around here), with all the pressure to have brand-name clothing and accessories, until last week. In MY day, all girls HAD to have an Esprit shoulder bag, even if it looked ridiculous in proportion to the person (ahem ahem) and Guess Jeans. In fact, having as much Esprit and Guess as possible was a pretty safe bet. Never mind that not everyone's parents were welling to shell out $40-50 on a 12 year old's jeans. (I know, kids buy $100 jeans nowadays with a pocket for their $300 ipod. Call me old) You would think that in adulthood, the type of bag you have shouldn't matter anymore, much less your lunch bag. But I've teased my husband about how selective he is with his lunch bags- generally small shopping bags which guys normally hate to have to carry in a shopping mall while their wife rummages through her purse, the kind that I affectionately refer to as the 'ding ding' bag, because it reminds me of a bell the way people carry them on a finger. The other morning I suddenly realized why it can matter. There, crossing a busy downtown street was a 30-something professional man in slacks and a button-up shirt, carrying a briefcase and a "Forever 21" dingding bag. Why would a grown man have a bright yellow plastic dingding bag from a discount teenage girl's clothing store? There could be dozens of reasons, but I couldn't help but smile, and wish in a way that I could be as blase' as he appeared to be. In the dim recesses of my mind I tried to pull the few Dateline NBC internet predator episodes I've seen to match his face...
A quick update since I've been AWOL...went back to NY again for xmas and had a nice visit, although a bit longer than really necessary. My nutty client who insisted he was a baron and one of the Stones in Sly and the Family Stone did not 'have his contract extended' with the employer and thus we are free of his discombobulating influence (Yipee!). And thanks to a Frenchie phrase calendar my brother gave me, the kind with those daily tear-off pages, I learned that the French expression for "We've had enough!" is literally translated as "The carrots are cooked!" I'm not quite sure how that originated but it explains why French TV was so hard to understand. Otherwise I'm once again absorbed with studying for the next exam, to be taken at the end of the month. (I passed the first!) Way past bedtime so off I go.